Pupil Mental Health, Well-being and Development

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Thursday 22nd February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I too welcome the opportunity to have a debate on this important area. We are at the start of a very long journey in trying to find the appropriate answers.

I am not as pessimistic as the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, about the state of schools. I often find them happy places. Not all is well and things could be better, but there are not 24,000 miserable institutions throughout the country. For many of our children, school is the only place where their well-being is protected; they are emotionally stronger, more stable and happier because they go to school every day. However, I absolutely accept that that is not true for everyone, and every child matters. We must do as much as we can to support those children who are falling off the edge.

I wondered why I never discussed issues such as this during my 18 years of teaching. There are probably two reasons why it was not on our agenda way back then. First, we are now more aware that children can have mental health problems and medical science means that we have done more to diagnose them. Secondly, I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, that the pressure has increased, and we need to look at that. The question is whether the schools are the cause of that deterioration of well-being and whether they are equipped to support children when the pressures come from outside. How much is it the schools’ fault and how much can they do to help when pressure comes from elsewhere?

I believe that children should be encouraged to do well in examinations. I am glad that I got mine. They gave me my life chances and every statistic shows that children who do not do so have worse opportunities. I have never apologised for any teacher or politician whose policies intend to narrow that divide between children who succeed in exams at school and those who do not. However, it is legitimate to ask what the cost of that has been in the way that we structure our schools. That is what I want to concentrate on. There has been a cost and we can do something about it, but we need to be honest and open and think very carefully.

The problem is not the higher expectations for all children to do well in their exams but the levers we use to try to bring that about. We have undoubtedly made these exams so high-pressured and high-risk that they create an environment in schools, from the head to the teachers to the parents and then trickling down to the children, whereby if you do not succeed, you are in trouble and a failure. That is a problem.

I always remember a young child who had not done as well in their exams as they thought they would saying to me, “Estelle, does that mean that I’m not any good and won’t be able to get a job?” It was very difficult in that moment to say, “Of course you can, everyone fails and you learn from it”, because the whole pressure prior to that had been to say, “If you don’t work hard, you won’t get a job, and success is doing A, B or C”. Those messages we give children are really important. You need your exams and should do as well as you can, but it is not the end of the world and you are not a worse person if you do not do as well as you might.

The second issue on which I agree very much with the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, is that there is no doubt that two things have happened. Things that can aid well-being—art, creativity, sport, time to think and space to talk, time to build good relationships—have been squeezed out of schools. Even where they have not, teachers do not think they are valued. Both those things are a huge problem. There are teachers who are trying to do those things; I see so much wonderful creativity in the arts in schools. You scratch your head and think, “I thought all of that was gone”. It is not valued, and because people think that government and others do not value it, that becomes a problem. There is more to be done, but I would not want to go back to the glory days when the division between the successes and failures was very much based on sex discrimination and social class discrimination.

Schools themselves can support children who may have mental health issues arising from pressures outside school, such as social media, drugs, fragmented communities, or families who do not have the skills to help them. Schools are absolutely key in this. They are the places where most children go and where trust is greatest—probably after child medical services.

We also need to address whether schools have the workforce to deliver on that task. There is so much more that could be done. If you look at the staffing of any school, you will probably find that almost all—but not all—the staff are employed to bring about academic progress and success. We need a better balance and skillset within schools. I would like to visit schools and find that, in addition to teachers whose job it is to get children through exams, there are also people with the time to talk about spiritual things, for example, to work magic, to take the kids out. We need people with skills and qualifications in mental health—not necessarily highly qualified psychologists, but people whose job it is to do early intervention and give early support for young children.

That is where the problem lies. Years and years ago, schools were part of their communities. All families, especially in village communities, sent their children to their local school, which often neighboured the church. It was a tight community where everyone knew what was going on. Whatever you think about it, parental choice and a move to doing better means that this community built around a school has broken down. However, it does not mean that we cannot use the school as a base and a community for the people it serves. It just means that we need to do it in a very different way.

I finish by acknowledging the work the Government have done on mental health support teams. They have not done anywhere near enough on the curriculum—PSHE and citizenship, for example—but that is for another day. I like the mental health support teams, and I declare an interest, in that I am involved with the Birmingham Education Partnership, which is in charge of managing and promoting some of these. However, I worry that they might be seen as a substitute for people who have slogged for years to gain well-earned qualifications. Progress really is too slow. We are covering only 35% of pupils, six years after the start of the initiative. It needs to be done better and faster. It would be helpful if the Minister could tell us when this might be rolled out nationally.